Chris Roberts talks Star Citizen and PC: why his dream space-sim would never work on consoles

"You can’t do that much with 512MB [of RAM], so that constrains a lot of your game design."

Here at games.on.net we’re pretty unabashedlyexcited about Chris Roberts’ return to PC gaming with Star Citizen. But why is he so keen to embrace PC gaming rather than move to consoles? Well, it’s mostly because he feels that to do so would really limit the possibilities.

“You can’t do that much with 512MB [of RAM on a console], so that constrains a lot of your game design,” said Roberts to Ars Technica. “If I’m building a PC game, I’m going ‘Yeah, you need 4GB on your machine.’ Of course you’re not going to get all 4GB because Windows is a hungry beast, but you’re getting a lot more than 512MB so it kinds of open up what you can do, what you can fit in memory at the same time, and it changes your level of ambition.”

“I’m looking at the high-end [hardware] today being the ‘Normal Gamer’ level in two years time,” claims Roberts. “It’ll be kind of like Wing Commander used to be. If you had the extra memory, if you had the 386, it was a better experience, but you could still play it on a 286.”

Roberts also took the opportunity to slam apathetic console ports from lazy developers. “I have a high-end gaming rig, but I’ve also got all the consoles, and if someone is making a game for a console first, and it’s being ported to the PC, I’m always buying it for the console. I don’t want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn’t really show my PC off.”

as soon as my rent is payed and my new employers pay packet comes in im gonna be throwing some money at kickstarter projects at these (thank fuck finally off the dole). This and the next x3 expansion has got my excited for the space trader/fighter/megacorp games again.

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